


Ghosts

by cruelmagic



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-11
Updated: 2014-09-11
Packaged: 2018-02-17 00:41:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2290664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruelmagic/pseuds/cruelmagic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens to a ghost when you give them a name?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghosts

**PART I**

 

When they wake him, he’s so cold that he thinks it’s only a dream and he’s still frozen, but ice on his skin turns into water and drips on the floor.

He cannot remember the days before the coldness—the world was covered in ice and snow since the very beginning. Even the sun is cold when it blinds him yet never warms his face, his body, or the arm. The arm feels like ice crystallising inside his body. He thinks he’s been dead for a long time but doesn’t remember when he died.

 

***

 

He cannot sleep.

He dreams about the plane and diving into the water, crashing, and then he’s cold, his dreams turn into ice and he wakes up on the floor. There’s no one to talk to and he doesn’t feel like catching up on popular culture, so he goes out and runs and runs and runs. It takes the mind off of things and at dusk he forgets about those seventy years of being dead.

 

After the sunrise the world stays grey and dimly lit. Everything’s become complicated and classified (secrets have secrets). He’s not even sure whether he’s on the right side. He certainly doesn’t know who’s on the other one.

 

***

 

Darkness keeps coming back like a thick veil in front of his eyes yet just outside his reach.

He has a codename but doesn’t have a name; he’s not human enough to possess one. He’s a machine, an asset, a thing, a soldier. Nothing he has is his; not his time, not his arm, and especially not his mind. He becomes a ghost, he doesn’t remember and cannot feel but he can haunt.

 

He doesn’t exist.

 

***

 

Nights are the longest when he’s not on a mission. He doesn’t really have anything; not his apartment, not his things, not his time. He’s used to not having much but he’s not used to having nothing at all.

 

***

 

He doesn’t dream; he’s empty, only missions etched into his brain with pain and blood. He kills to wipe it out, to forget (they’ll take the memories away, they always do, he has scars that remind him of that; they can’t take away the scars; he thinks he asked them once to do that and they just laughed and he didn’t care anymore because his scars ceased to remind him of the past, and instead they remind him that it doesn’t matter and he shouldn’t ask nor desire).

He doesn’t feel because things cannot feel, yet sometimes he sees glimpses in faces. Names appear on the tip of his tongue but they never sound right. Even his tongue doesn’t belong to him, he has no language—words appear backwards in his mind, like a mirror image, and he cannot decipher the meaning behind them, he cannot use them to describe himself nor the people he sees when they wake him, or even the targets. So he doesn’t speak because silence is easier than this futile struggle. They don’t care about his thoughts nor his words anyway.

 

 

**PART II**

 

Being Steve Rogers was easier when there were people who remembered him for who he was, who saw a person and not a symbol. He lived beyond his myth and it drags him, suffocates him but how anyone can understand. There’s no one he can trust in the world full of secrets.

He sees Bucky’s name every time he enters the S.H.I.E.L.D facility and he closes his eyes just for a second imagining Peggy hanging it there. They were all victims of war in a way.

S.H.I.E.L.D is made of shadows and puppets, and he’s become one of them: the one with a star on the forehead and above his heart. It’s almost like they’d put him back together after his fall but forgot some pieces and he’s incomplete. He tries to find himself on his own but isn’t sure what he’s lost.

He fights, he runs, he jumps when they tell him, and all this movement keeps him occupied.

Natasha thinks he should start dating but how can he? Who wants to look through Captain America and meet Steve Rogers the skinny kid from Brooklyn who would not give up in a fight?

He tries to remember the little guy because that’s what’s good in him, not the war, not the shadows, not the ice, not the overwhelming sadness he never reveals. “I miss them,” he whispers at night to an empty room. It’s raining, he doesn’t like it when it’s raining because there won’t be anyone to run with him.

When he looks in the mirror he’s not sure he recognises who he is. “Is it what you’ve had in mind, doctor Erskine?” he asks but still no one answers.

 

Every time he thinks he’s found a solid ground, the earth beneath his feet shakes and he loses another piece of himself.

He visits Peggy and sometimes he still cannot comprehend what happened. How come he didn’t age a day while she’s lying there barely remembering him. He doesn’t even feel real, he feels like a shell bearing the Captain America facade. Maybe Steve Rogers died during that crash, maybe he’s just a ghost.

He’s not sure if being a dancing monkey wasn’t easier.

 

 

**PART III**

 

What happens to a ghost when you give them a name?

 

What happens with a shell when you give them a memory?

 

You take them away again and again, and again, until there’s nothing left but a blind obedience.

 

Ghosts shall remain nameless. Remorseless. Soulless. What use is an asset that hesitates? What use is an asset trying to be a _person_?

 

 

**PART IV**

 

Captain America knows that mission comes before Bucky, this is how it works, but Steve Rogers…

Steve Rogers takes off his mask and refuses to fight because killing the Winter Soldier was never part of his mission. Saving him was. And if he cannot save him—

“Cause I’m with you till the end of the line,” he repeats words from their past. They’re ghosts ripped from their time and from their loved ones. They do not belong anywhere, yet they belong with each other.

So he takes every punch but it doesn’t hurt. He has no more place for pain other than the pain of failing Bucky, leaving him and losing him. The sorrow fills him up and breaks his voice but he waits and waits for the Winter Soldier to become his friend.

 

Water fills his mouth but he couldn’t breathe anyway. Because now he’s truly lost everything.

 

 

**PART V**

 

The shore is safe; no one’s around, no one’s looking. They’re all fallen.

He leaves him and repeats the words so foreign to him, unreal: “James Buchanan Barnes,” he said. His own name means nothing to him.

So he says different words: “Captain America”, but they too seem insignificant and bring no recollection. So he finds different words again: “Steve Rogers,” and he whispers them again and again, and his hand is trembling, his jaw clenched, he knew him, _he knew him_ , he was his friend.

And the arm is so heavy, so deadly, stained with blood of people whose names and faces he cannot recall. He hides it but the metal is part of him, part of his body because this is all he now possesses: this and the name of his friend. He hides himself, a shadow, still not entirely real, and he goes looking for memories that are genuine, and not twisted by HYDRA, yet he cannot remember them himself and he repeats the stories before sleep so he won’t forget, so he’ll become a person again. Sometimes he counts his scars and remembers the pain but still doesn’t know how he got them.

There’s one thought that haunts the ghost: what if it was all his fault?


End file.
